Years after cell phones made pagers obsolete, the patents underlying the chirping messengers can still come back to bite Apple.
A federal jury in Marshall, Texas, decided yesterday that Apple must pay $23.6 million for stepping on patents for SkyTel pager technology that dates back to the 1990s, Bloomberg News reported on Tuesday. Claiming that Apple gadgets lean heavily on its technology for sending and storing messages, Mobile Telecommunications Technologies asked the jury for about $1 per iDevice, adding up to about $237.2 million in damages. But lawyers for Apple managed to pare back that request, though the company was ultimately found to infringe the patents.
A damage award of $237 million is not common sense, it s not logical, Apple lawyer Brian Ferguson told the jury, according to Bloomberg.
Apple has gone to trial over pager technology twice in the past two months, Bloomberg noted. Last month in San Jose federal court, Apple beat back an offensive from GPNE Corp., which sought nearly $94 million in damages. U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh forbid Apple from calling GPNE a patent troll during the trial, but the smartphone giant did just that after it emerged victorious, according to Bloomberg.
Above: A federal jury in Texas found Apple must pay for infringing patents that cover pager technology (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images).
